2-16: Long Live the Queen

Having put some distance between themselves and the foglands, the gang is free to work their way south down the coastal region of Dreg. The first couple hours make for a pleasant ramble free of fogmen, cannibals, or any other assailants. A reinvigorating sea breeze washes over the gang as they stroll along. They stick to the hilltops, looking past the reddish-leafed shade trees dotting the shore to the gently rolling dark blue of the bay and the strip of rocky islands sheltering this place from the wide ocean.

They aren't the only ones enjoying the view out here. Late in the afternoon, they come upon a tiny little village of nomads who've decided to settle down. The settlement is barely more than a couple huts, but just like travelling nomad bands, they have animals for sale. The gang declines to buy any—they can't really care for another baby animal at the moment—but if they have a need for an animal in the future, it's good to have a place they know they can go rather than wandering around and hoping to run into some nomads.

There are a couple more tiny little villages on this peninsula, fishing villages that seem to enjoy regular nomad visits. They aren't particularly eager to chat with Jam and the gang; it seems they have nice little lives carved out here and aren't particularly interested in the outside world. It's not completely safe and idyllic—the gang did have to fight a couple small groups of fogmen and scrawny cannibals as they walked between villages—but neither cannibals nor fogmen seem to come this far out in great force and the peninsula is quite isolated from the Holy Nation and other dangerous factions. It seems like a pretty alright place to be, all told.

The next destination the gang has in mind is one of the ruins they learned about from a treasure map. It's the one that's on an island off the coast. It sure would be convenient if the fishing villages here had boats the gang could use, but no one builds boats these days. They'll have to swim if they want to get there.

The gang keeps following the coast, fighting a few more fogmen and discovering another hive village. Eventually, the rocky shores of Dreg give way to the fertile land of Vain.

It's not just the princes' rudeness that gives Jam a knot in their stomach whenever the gang approaches a hive village. In the hives, there isn't really such thing as free will. The hivers do have minds, they are able to think, but every thought must be congruent with the inescapable, pheremone-driven drive to serve the queen.

Some of the gang start to wonder why they haven't seen a queen yet in any of the hive villages they've been to if queens are so central to hive life, but Jam corrects them. The villages don't each have their own queens. All the villages the gang has visited so far are part of a single hive, the Western Hive, and the Western Hive Queen lives... well, here Jam starts getting evasive. Somewhere in Vain, they admit. Somewhere people wouldn't think to look.

Further attempts to cajole the info out of them are interrupted when the gang spots a powerful-looking beast trundling their way.

This is a gorillo. These burly creatures aren't as deadly as beak things and don't travel in packs like beak things do, but they are aggressive and they're still nothing to trifle with. They're pretty common around Vain. As it turns out, beak things are also quite common around Vain, making this yet another pretty dangerous area to travel.

Realizing it's not necessarily safe to stand out in the open and chat, the gang gets a bit of distance from the gorillo and turns the conversation to how they're going to reach the ruin. The most obvious route would be to minimize swimming time by heading south until they're as close to the ruin's island as possible then swimming from there. That would mean more time spent in Vain, though, and therefore more time to be found by gorillos and beak things. The alternate route is to swim from where the gang is right now, a little ways north of the ruin island, along the chevron-shaped island chain. Swimming is hard work and it'd be a longer distance travelled, but so long as there isn't any kind of horrible creature waiting in the water, it should be safer.

Jam is convinced the gang is experienced enough with beak things to avoid the bulk of them and kill the few they can't escape but they get outvoted. The gang opts for the long swim around the island chain instead. They do some stretches, take a deep breath, then wade into the water.

Uh oh! Turns out the water being red isn't just a trick of the light. Swimming in it isn't instant death or anything but it will slowly eat away at each body part. It takes some real top-grade stubbornness for the gang not to immediately turn around and abandon the whole venture. The nearest island is very close, though. They end up swimming all the way to it rather than re-litigating the argument about how to get to the ruin while treading water in an acid bath.

The water on the far side of the island looks much more normal—significantly less red. Riddly wades in to check and finds that it is, mercifully, not acid. Not acidic enough to hurt the skin, anyway. No one's in any hurry to drink it.

There is in fact a faint but noticeable border in the water dividing the acidic part from the safe part. The vast majority of this swim is going to be through safe water, which makes several of the gang breathe deep sighs of relief. If the whole stretch was acid, most of the gang wouldn't be able to make it the whole way alive. Most. The thing about acid in Kenshi is that it only affects humans and shek. Hivers, skeletons, and animals are completely unbothered, which may serve to explain why Vain is the Western Hive's heartland.

After a brief rest, the gang hops back in the water and starts swimming toward the next island. This stretch is much longer than the first and it takes the gang a long, long time. Swimming is naturally much slower than running—that's no surprise—but on top of that, swim speed is not governed by the Athletics skill, which the gang has been training up this whole time as they walk from place to place. It's governed by none other than the Swimming skill, which none of the gang are even a little proficient at since there hasn't been any reason for them to swim up until now.

The swim is so long that the gang decides to liven it up with a race. Immediately, wide gaps open up between them. They are not on even footing. First of all, Burn cheats. That's a disingenuous way of putting it since they don't have any choice in the matter, but the point is: Skeletons don't have to swim. They can't swim. They're so heavy they sink and just walk along the bottom of the water, traversing about five times faster than a novice swimmer can.

Bulls like Pilaf seem at first like they're also walking in the water rather than swimming since they don't have a separate swimming animation, but no—they're simply very good swimmers and easily outpace any human of similar skill. Outlaw Farmer, Riddly and Keys set the pace for the humanoids who actually have to swim, Outlaw Farmer only outpacing the other two because she's the least encumbered. Ells trails—shek are slow swimmers—followed by Jam and, in last place, Horse. For Jam and Horse, the struggle comes from their prosthetics. In game terms, Jam's arm gives a 25% penalty to their swim speed and Horse's leg a 14% penalty, making them both slow as molasses. The prosthetics in Kenshi are all mechanical and no good in the water, and they're quite heavy besides. Having skeleton limbs works out fine for Burn who doesn't have to breathe, but fighting to stay above water with one of those things is a miserable experience.

It takes Horse six hours to reach the next island. The game's tooltip describes the swimming skill as “your ability to swim faster and further without drowning” but drowning was never actually implemented, so Horse does eventually make it. Thank goodness.

It's another six hours (for Horse) to the third island, which to the majority of the gang's surprise, has another hive settlement on it.

While the skies are clear over the water in every other direction as far as the eye can see, a torrent of red rain cascades over this island specifically, just like the red rain in Vain. The water immediately around the island is acidic too, though it doesn't look it. It's enough to make one wonder if the hives are somehow making the water acidic rather than just opportunistically setting up in a place that's hostile to humans but not to them. It's not a very solid theory since none of the distant hives outside Vain are surrounded by acidic water, but it's really strange to have red rain and acid water specifically concentrated on just this island, right?

While this place looks just like any other hive village from the outside, the game informs us otherwise: This is the Western Hive. The Queen reigns from the hut on the hill here. Jam fills the rest of the gang in and then declares, in no uncertain terms, that they will personally not be going in to see her. She has nothing for them. The rest of the gang can go in if they want, even though there's no point, if they're really curious, so long as they keep their weapons sheathed and don't do anything stupid...

Of course the rest of the gang is going in. They're dreadfully curious. Riddly leads the way, completely unprepared for what she's about to see.

The moment Riddly crosses the threshold, the Queen lets out an ear-splitting screech. Her guards fly into a panic, shouting things like “We're sorry, queen!” “Leave us!” and “NGAHHH!” The gang is taken aback. Even putting aside the screaming, the Queen is weirder than they expected. She has a cylindrical metal tank attached to her abdomen, numerous tubes running between her and it. Is that—is that where hivers come from?

Before the gang can think much about it, someone's going to have to calm the room. The Queen doesn't seem to be in a state of mind to do it so Riddly steps up.

There's a lot to unpack here.

For starters, the tank attached to the Queen's abdomen is her “dispenser unit” and is indeed where hivers come from. Every Western hiver, including Jam, comes from that tank. The second thing that stands out about the Queen is that her health bars are all grey like a skeleton's, not green like an organic's. This implies that she is entirely a machine, that she doesn't just have one attached to her.

This is where things devolve into wild speculation. In-game, there's never any discussion of what the Queen is exactly. There's never any mention of hive queens being born or made or of any other kind of hiver being able to become a queen somehow. If we are to believe that the Queen is some sort of robot despite most of her body looking like that of other hivers, we could start assuming that she is incredibly ancient, from the time of the skeletons. Certainly it would seem odd for modern hivers to be able to make a machine sophisticated-looking enough to pass as a hiver considering the slapdash quality of their prosthetics.

All there is to know about hive queens comes from extratextual scraps of information from Lo-Fi Games. A 2016 blog post on their site states that new queens can be made by having the queen's eggs fertilized by another hiver, which seems to contradict the notion of hive queens being robots. The bit about the "dispenser unit" comes from a 2022 official tweet, clashing with the idea of queens laying eggs. I'm unsure how seriously I should even take a blog post from before the game's official release; if it is canonical, we're left with contradicting information and if it isn't, we're left with mystery and inference. I personally prefer the latter but either way, I find hivers fascinating.

Whatever the truth about the Queen, the gang isn't thinking that far down the rabbit hole when they retreat from the Queen's throne room. They're just feeling like there's no point talking with her further and getting kinda nervous about how jumpy her guards are. It feels like one wrong move and limbs would start flying.

That isn't quite borne out by the gameplay—despite the tension, the guards won't actually attack unless you attack first or get caught stealing from them or something—but it is true that there's nothing more for the gang to do here. They wade back out into the water and swim over to the island with the ruin.